“You are left holding their despair”: when secondary trauma is compounded by the organisation
People working with children who have experienced trauma are routinely asked to do something emotionally difficult. They must listen carefully, remain curious, build trust, tolerate distress and create enough safety for children to talk about experiences that may be frightening, violent, abusive or deeply painful.
We increasingly recognise that this work can affect the practitioner too, but what we are less willing to confront is what happens when the organisation that employs that practitioner makes the impact worse.
A new UK and Ireland study provides an important reason to have that conversation.
Published on 9 September 2026 in the Journal of Child & Adolescent Trauma, Gordon and colleagues explored secondary trauma among 11 school staff in England, Northern Ireland and the Republic of Ireland. It is a small qualitative study, so its findings should not be treated as estimates of prevalence or generalised uncritically across entire workforces. But the experiences described by participants will be recognisable far beyond education.
The researchers identified four themes: a system under strain; the intrusive weight of trauma; the nurturer and the fixer; and navigating the burden. Participants described workload pressures, inadequate supervision, superficial organisational responses, difficulty acknowledging distress and the emotional consequences of repeatedly encountering children's trauma.
One participant captured the experience particularly powerfully:
“You are left holding their despair.”
That sentence deserves attention across children's services.
Secondary trauma is not simply being stressed at work
Secondary traumatic stress is different from ordinary occupational pressure. It describes trauma-related effects arising through indirect exposure to another person's traumatic experiences. These can include intrusive thoughts, disturbed sleep, heightened arousal, changes in mood and difficulty separating emotionally from what has been heard or witnessed.
For practitioners working with children, exposure does not necessarily come through a single dramatic incident.
It can accumulate.
The disclosure during a home visit. The child describing violence as though it were completely ordinary. Reading the police material before court. Seeing photographs of injuries. Hearing about exploitation. Trying to find somewhere safe for a child who cannot go home. Discovering what happened after a child disappeared overnight. Meeting a parent whose own trauma means that they are struggling to protect their child….the list goes on…
Then doing something similar again the following day.
Relationship-based practice may actually increase this exposure. We rightly encourage practitioners to build trusting relationships because children are more likely to disclose difficult experiences where they feel safe. Recent research specifically involving youth justice practitioners makes this point. Brierley-Sollis, Dubberley and Hughes found that the relational space which can allow a child to disclose and process trauma can simultaneously leave an ‘emotional residue’ with the practitioner. Their study involved 36 service providers, including 30 working within Youth Offending Teams, and identified indirect trauma as an important occupational risk within relational and trauma-informed youth justice practice.
There is an uncomfortable paradox here.
The better we become at creating psychologically safe relationships for children, the more important it becomes that we create psychologically safe environments for the people providing them.
But what happens after the disclosure?
This is where Gordon and colleagues' study becomes particularly interesting.
Participants were not simply describing exposure to children's trauma. They described the conditions into which that exposure landed. Heavy workloads meant there was little time to process difficult experiences. Training could feel performative rather than useful. Formal support was sometimes experienced as something an organisation could point to rather than something genuinely capable of containing the emotional demands of the work. Some participants felt that organisational cultures discouraged people from admitting that they were struggling.
The consequence is important.
The original trauma belongs to the child.
The secondary exposure comes through the work.
But the organisation determines, at least partly, what happens next.
Does the practitioner have time to think?
Is there reflective supervision?
Can somebody say, ‘That case has really affected me’, without worrying that they will be regarded as incapable?
Can workloads be adjusted following an exceptionally difficult incident?
Does supervision explore the emotional experience of the work, or does it consist predominantly of deadlines, case progression, risk ratings and recording requirements?
Is support routinely available, or does somebody have to reach crisis point before an employee assistance telephone number is offered?
These are not peripheral wellbeing questions. They concern how the work and the work place itself, is designed.
When the organisation becomes another source of harm
This raises the possibility of thinking about organisational trauma. Its noted that this term should not be used as a clinical diagnosis for every difficult workplace, nor should ordinary frustration with bureaucracy be described as traumatic.
But it offers a useful lens through which to consider organisations that repeatedly expose workers to experiences of powerlessness, insecurity or emotional threat while simultaneously denying them meaningful opportunities to process what they encounter.
A practitioner may therefore experience two related pressures. First, there is the emotional impact of what children bring into the relationship. Then there is the experience of working within an organisation that provides insufficient time, containment, autonomy or psychological safety to manage that impact.
The second can amplify the first.
Gordon and colleagues describe these organisational conditions as mutually reinforcing rather than isolated problems. Workload pressure, inadequate support, limited supervision and cultures that inhibit help-seeking can combine to create circumstances in which secondary traumatic stress is more able to take hold.
That distinction matters because otherwise we locate the problem in the practitioner.
Phrases such as ‘They need greater resilience’, ‘They need better boundaries’, ‘They need mindfulness’, ‘They need to practise self-care’ and ‘They need to learn how not to ‘take work home’, become commonplace.
Of course individual strategies can help. But telling somebody to develop better coping mechanisms while leaving the conditions producing the distress unchanged is not a trauma-informed organisational response.
Sometimes the practitioner does not need another wellbeing webinar.
They need fewer cases.
They need time.
They need effective reflective supervision.
They need a manager who understands the emotional content of the work.
They need permission to be affected by what they have heard.
Youth justice should pay particular attention
This issue is particularly important for youth justice because contemporary practice places enormous emphasis on relationships.
Child First practice asks us to see children as children, build on their strengths, work collaboratively and promote positive outcomes. Trauma-informed practice asks practitioners to understand behaviour within children's developmental and experiential contexts.
Both approaches require curiosity, and curiosity uncovers things.
The more we understand the child behind an offence, the more likely we are to encounter bereavement, abuse, violence, neglect, exploitation, disrupted attachment, poverty, exclusion and experiences of systems that have repeatedly failed them.
Recent youth justice research found practitioners describing precisely this expansion. Relational work frequently moved beyond offence-focused intervention into crisis response, homelessness, bereavement, family instability and emotional support. Practitioners described becoming important sources of stability for children and sometimes their families, while having to negotiate dependency, endings, statutory authority and risk management alongside that relationship.
These are considerable emotional demands, yet many youth justice practitioners do not receive the kind of clinical or reflective supervision routinely expected in professions explicitly recognised as therapeutic.
There is also a wider workforce problem. Social Work England's workforce research found that 79 per cent of surveyed social workers identified high workloads and burnout as a major challenge for their organisation. Respondents also described bureaucratic and ‘tick-box’ processes taking time away from meaningful work.
Research involving UK children's social workers similarly found declining wellbeing and increasing work-related burnout during the pandemic, alongside rising service demands, staff shortages and increasing complexity. This does not prove that the same mechanisms operate identically across schools, social work and youth justice but it does suggest that Gordon and colleagues are describing something that deserves much wider investigation.
Trauma-informed practice cannot stop with the child
Perhaps the greatest contradiction is that organisations can become highly sophisticated in discussing trauma in children while remaining remarkably unsophisticated about its effect on staff.
We teach practitioners that behaviour communicates something. We encourage them to consider what has happened to a child rather than simply asking what is wrong with them. We emphasise safety, relationships, predictability, voice and trust. Then an exhausted practitioner becomes irritable, detached, anxious, defensive or emotionally numb and the organisational response can suddenly become very different.
Performance is discussed. Resilience is questioned. Absence is monitored. Capability processes appear. The contextual curiosity disappears.
A genuinely trauma-informed organisation should be capable of extending some of the same curiosity towards its workforce that it expects practitioners to extend towards children. This does not mean abandoning accountability or suggesting that employees should never experience pressure. Children's services involve serious responsibilities and difficult decisions. It means recognising that emotional exposure is an occupational feature of the work rather than an unfortunate personal weakness experienced by a few practitioners who cannot cope.
There are already examples of organisations approaching it differently. A Southampton Children and Families Services initiative introduced regular reflexive peer-group supervision and critical-incident debriefing specifically in response to the emotional impact of complex and trauma-related work. The programme also developed supervision training for managers.
That moves the question from: How do we make practitioners more resilient?
to: How do we design organisations in which practitioners can remain psychologically healthy while doing emotionally demanding work?
That is a much more useful question.
What would a psychologically informed organisation do differently?
There is no single intervention that resolves secondary trauma. But the emerging evidence suggests that organisations should examine some fairly fundamental features of practice.
Reflective supervision needs to provide genuine space for emotional processing, rather than becoming another case-management meeting. Workload decisions should recognise emotional intensity as well as numerical caseload size. Managers need enough psychological understanding to recognise secondary trauma and vicarious trauma. Teams need permission to talk about difficult work before somebody reaches crisis. Critical incidents should generate opportunities for reflection rather than simply procedural review.
Most importantly, responsibility cannot sit entirely with individual practitioners. An employee assistance programme may be useful. It is not an organisational strategy for secondary trauma. A wellbeing app is not a substitute for manageable workloads. A training session on resilience cannot compensate for a culture in which admitting vulnerability feels unsafe, and supervision cannot provide psychological containment if every available minute is consumed by performance indicators and case administration.
Being affected does not mean being ineffective
Perhaps we also need to challenge one of the quieter assumptions within children's services: that the most competent practitioner is the one who remains unaffected.
That misunderstands relational work.
Practitioners are not machines into which children deposit information. Human connection is precisely why relationships can be powerful. Being moved by a child's experiences is not evidence that professional boundaries have failed.
The question is whether practitioners have somewhere safe to put what they are carrying afterwards.
Gordon and colleagues' study is small. More research is needed, particularly within statutory children's services and youth justice. But its central message deserves serious attention.
If we deliberately construct services around relationships with children who have experienced trauma, we must also construct organisations capable of supporting the people who enter those relationships.
Otherwise we risk creating an extraordinary contradiction.
We ask practitioners to provide safety while they feel unsafe. We ask them to regulate distressed children while they have little opportunity to regulate themselves. We ask them to remain emotionally available while workloads encourage emotional withdrawal and when the accumulated impact finally becomes visible, we call it a wellbeing problem.
Sometimes the trauma comes through the work, but sometimes the organisation helps determine whether the practitioner can carry it.
Reference
Gordon, P., Dempster, M., McMullen, J. and Hanna, D. (2026) ‘“You Are Left Holding Their Despair”: A Reflexive Thematic Analysis of Secondary Trauma Among School Staff’, Journal of Child & Adolescent Trauma. Published 9 September 2026. https://doi.org/10.1007/s40653-026-00972-6
Brierley-Sollis, T., Dubberley, S. and Hughes, C. (2026) ‘Re-living the storm – The paradox of trauma narratives: A qualitative study exploring indirect trauma among youth justice practitioners’, Criminology & Criminal Justice. First published online 23 August 2026. https://doi.org/10.1177/17488958261479240
